Adaptive IVR Blog

Mindfulness.  It's not just personal anymore.  It's a state of mind that can enhance performance in the contact center if you apply it to your WFO and IVR strategies.  Start with your approach to the three P’s of business – people, process and product.

Learning expert, Eduardo Brinceno, said in his popular TedTalk How to get better at the things you care about

“...the most effective people and teams in any domain do something we can all emulate. They go through life deliberately alternating between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone.”

So what does that mean for creating contact center mindfulness that delivers actionable, improved results? Let’s put our learning zone caps on for the moment, because what you read next will help you get to your performance zone even faster.

Last week’s Verint Engage 2017 Global Customer Conference (#Verint17) brought customers and prospects from across the world together to address the rapidly changing customer care environment.  As a first-time Engage attendee and staffer the event left a positive impression on me – directly from informed and inquisitive customers, from C-level to technical to operations, and across many industries. Running an effective contact center is not all rainbows and unicorns, but there are certainly inspirational moments that create a rainbow or two. Here’s how I sum up the content of the conference and the direction Verint and industry-leading customer service and customer experience experts see as the optimal way to deliver exceptional customer service through your evolving contact center operations:

• Lead the evolution of the Enterprise
• Clear the path for the best Customer Journey
• Embrace the value of Employee Engagement

As made clear at Engage, it’s never going to be one-size-fits-all, but it doesn’t need to be complex. Let’s dig deeper into each area.

Integrating IVR and WFO Data Can Improve Operations and Customer Experience 

We’re all familiar with silos – those “isolated islands of data” (per Harvard Business Review) that make it difficult or impossible to share and analyze information to make better business decisions. This is particularly true in the contact center.

Silos can arise from several scenarios created by organizational culture and technology:

• proliferation of applications, particularly niche software, which don’t work together
• reliance on multiple project teams that may compete with each other
• data hoarding by departments or database administrators
• mergers and acquisitions that bring together disparate organizations with duplicative databases

Whatever their origin, data silos are a major problem, particularly in the age of Big Data and analytics. They prevent people from seeing the “big picture” that is necessary to spot opportunities, trends and problems affecting the organization as a whole. Data silos also act as barriers to collaboration, productivity and efficiency. Forrester agrees.  See why...